30 day itinerary Sep/Aug advice

Hello. I'm travelling to Japan from 26.7.-25.8. this year with my girlfriend. We're in our mid thirties, have been to the country before but focused on Tokyo and the Honshu area.

We plan for our trip to do sightseeing, enjoying the local culture, cuisine and nature.

Can you please give feedback to my following plan:

Tokyo 3 days
Kyushu 10 days (Tokyo>Kagoshima by plane, then maybe 2 other cities? Kumamoto, Fukuoka)?
Hiroshima 2 days
3 days unplanned
Kyoto 5 days (visit Osaka, Nara Tokae)
Koyasan 2 days (stay at buddhist temple)
3 days unplanned
Tokyo 3 days (doing daytrips, visit Fuji etc.)

What do you think of this? For our trip in the past we used the 3 week Japan rail pass, but as it's gotten a lot more expensive now and we're moving around quite far, is there a ticket that would help us reduce the cost of travelling?

The first thing that strikes me is that it's going to be miserably hot and muggy during that time, unless you go to the mountains. It'd be a great time to see Hokkaido or the northern Tohoku Region. At any rate, regarding transportation, start be looking at the regional rail passes.
https://www.japan-guide.com/e/e2357.html

For Kyushu, if you're looking for interesting cities, make one of them Nagasaki. It has a unique history and absolutely wonderful food.
For your first 3 undecided days, there are lots of possibilities. You could see Iwakuni, Onomichi, Kurashiki, Okayama, Takamatsu, Kobe, Himeji, or many other places.
https://goo.gl/V6K1jx

Another option is to take all your open days and tour your way back to Tokyo via the Hokuriku route - go see some sights in Fukui, Kanazawa, and Nagano. Or like I said, go up north as a side trip from Tokyo.

Is renting a car in Kyushu an option? There are a lot of nice countryside options such as Aso mountain, Kurokawa onsen, but they are best explored by private transport.

On the free days you have between Hiroshima and Kyoto I would visit some of the art islands (Teshima, Inujima, Naoshima�c). Maybe stay in Takamatsu.

I hope you are aware of the heat in July and August. To me that�fs a time to go to the office and enjoy the a/c waiting for September and cooler temperatures.

The rail pass situation has gotten to be a lot more complicated since the big price increase on the nationwide JR pass, and decisions about which pass(es) to buy to save money on transportation can be rather difficult. In my case, I recently took a 30-day trip that covered almost exactly the same route you are planning (Tokyo to Kagoshima) although I didn�ft go to Koyasan. To plan my trip I spent hours (and hours) considering all of the possible options including domestic travel and various combinations of regional passes and single tickets, and in the end organized all of my major travel into a 21-day period and spent the rest of my days in Kanto (split between the beginning and end of my trip). The three-week nationwide pass was simply the best choice for me. And it definitely saved me money. Some other options would have been cheaper, but the itinerary I was able to come up with using the pass was really wonderful. Trip of a lifetime level�c

I am not proposing that you change your basic outline and get a 21-day pass, but I will say that it is simply not true that in order to get a nationwide pass to �gpay off�h you need to be constantly taking long train rides. I had a fair number of days when I didn�ft use the pass for anything other than minimal local trips, and only one day when I spent the better part of a day on shinkansen trains. (I opted to get from Kumamoto to Yokohama at the end in one day, although I easily could have split it up.) The long-distance train rides that I did take were at a minimum comfortable, and most of them were also very enjoyable (despite a few too many tunnels).

Anyway, I will just say that the nationwide JR pass still rocks if you have a travel plan that suits it (yours comes pretty close) and use it strategically. So if I were you I wouldn�ft categorically rule it out. To be sure, there are some downsides to the nationwide pass (or to any all-you-can-ride pass), but there are also some benefits that rarely get mentioned (especially these days). In a sense it would be the simplest alternative for you, rather than patching together a package of local and regional passes, individual tickets, and domestic air travel (of course, you could do that too), plus possibly a rental car (if this would be an option for you, then it is in fact a great choice for Kyushu, and that would certainly factor into your decision about rail passes)

Having the JR pass saved me money on hotels as well as trains. Without twisting my itinerary into knots I was able to avoid the rather unwelcome upcharges that you typically have to pay if you stay in the most popular cities (e.g., Tokyo, Yokohama, Kyoto, Osaka, Fukuoka) on a weekend. By using the pass strategically to place myself in cheaper cities on the weekends (and take some day trips from these cities), I ended up with a really great series of hotels and felt very good about the prices I got on all of them.

That said, I would probably go north during your time period, as others have suggested. (I don�ft handle heat very well myself.) Or at least use a rail pass strategically to beat the heat by spending some quality time on comfortable, air-conditioned trains�c.

Have fun on your trip!